Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Why doesn’t it bother more Americans that their government lies to them constantly?

The latest hullabaloo in Washington D.C. is over an article
in the London Review of Books written by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
The article attacks the government’s narrative around the killing of Osama bin
Laden in 2011. Hersh claims that the Obama administration’s version of events
is a hot dish of lies and that the Pakistani government had bin Laden under
house arrest in Abbottabad for five years prior to the attack on the compound
by American forces. They only decided to tell the U.S. where bin Laden was
after years of pay-offs, intelligence feeds and “incentives.” The dramatic
attack on the terrorist’s compound was a staged production with a pre-ordained
outcome.

Salon has a good overview of Hersh’s piece here and the
unsurprising attacks on the author from the slavish mainstream press. The
author of the article raises the simple question: Who deserves the benefit of
the doubt amid the accusations of lying being thrown around? The highly
respected journalist who carefully annotated his article with sources or the
Obama administration, which has lied through its teeth on numerous occasions
and is doing so right now in its defense of the secretive Trans Pacific
Partnership.

From its very earliest days when it wanted to continue
Bush’s practice of keeping the White House visitors list secret to the Snowden
NSA revelations to its attacks on whistleblower, the Obama administration has
routinely lied or suppressed information in its manic desire to keep its
actions behind the curtain and out of public view. The President who once
promised us the most transparent administration in history has instead presided
over one of the most secretive, shadowy operations Washington has ever seen.

Why aren’t more American’s outraged by this? Are we so
cynical and turned off by politics that nothing fazes us anymore? We (the
mainstream press and low information citizens) continue to defer to authority
when there is a question raised, despite the fact that they have lied to us
time after time after time. How bad will it have to get before we stand up and
say “stop?”

If Americans are stupid enough to elect a Republican
President in 2016, we’ll find out.